3 Steps to Leveraging Mobile Technology to Work & Live on the Road by Dai Manuel

3 Steps for Leveraging Mobile Technology to Work and Live on the road

Road tripping: A road trip is a long distance journey on the road. Typically, these long epic distances are traveled by automobile; especially RVs — or in our case, our faithful X5 diesel.

As of December 2016, the “Moose” Manuel family have been on the road.

We got rid of pretty much everything we owned, regulated our life to the contents of a few suitcases and have put ourselves on the road full-time. People often ask us ‘Why?’ we’ve embarked on this journey. The answer is triple-fold: 1. to promote the release of my first book, The Whole Life Fitness Manifesto (#WLFMroadtrip); 2. to connect with communities (our tribe) offline, in-real-life; and 3. to embrace the fact there’s a very distinct and different way to live and not just the status quo3 (#ProjectFullTimeFamily – check outwww.thelifeenhancers.com for more on this).

Downsizing our Lifestyle so we can Upsize our Living

From the point of quitting our ‘career’ jobs in the Summer of 2015 to finally heading off on the road a few months later, we spent a lot of time simplifying our lifestyles. As you can imagine, when you cut a lot of the extra costs in your day-to-day living and boil life down to a vehicle and your basic necessities, you’d be amazed at how far you can stretch your dollars. We literally cut back our monthly overhead by about 75% which simply meant we didn’t need as much to survive and thrive anymore.

All this being said, there is one thing we couldn’t let go and that was our connectivity with technology. Case in point, here’s one of the videos I shot with my iPhone 6 while visiting Yachats, Oregon.

Now that we’ve committed full-time to the nomadic e-preneur lifestyle, technology is our lifeline. It allows us to continue to work without borders in the geographical sense of the word, and keep us connected to our tribe (and our clients) online anytime and anywhere we find ourselves on our travels.

3 Steps for Leveraging Mobile Technology to Work and Live on the road

The last 3 months have seen me travel from Vancouver, Canada to San Diego, California, from Palm Springs to Toronto, and from Washington DC to Winnipeg, Manitoba… and a lot of cities in-between. My biggest concern was how do I manage to stay connected without amassing a huge cell phone bill? Thankfully, my carrier and technology partner,TELUS, was there to help me weigh out my options.

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page” – Augustine

Step 1: Know what you signed up for

There’s a lot of fine print in cell phone contracts. Know exactly what your plan covers you for, paying special attention to how they classify ‘roaming’ and its respective charges. Depending on the coverage of your carrier and the type of plan you’ve opted for, ‘roaming’ can take on several meanings and charges can really start to add-up quickly.

Step 2: Know your travel options

Before we set off on the road, we needed to know what our options were. We knew we’d be out of the country for more than just a few days, so the simple Easy Roam $7/day option was a consideration. It’s really awesome, whether you’re travelling long or short term in the US from Canada. In fact, on long-trips you can add US Easy Roam and toggle the feature on and off from your phone, only using Easy Roam on the day you don’t have access to WiFi or need to use your phone. Cool right?

Have you ever found yourself rushing to your gate trying to make a flight and remembered ‘damn, I forgot to add a travel plan’! Well, a special note for TELUS customers. Did you know that adding US Easy Roam to your device is easy? Simply text TRAVEL to 7626 from your device or log into your account online and view roaming options. How’s that for customer service!

Knowing how much I use my phone for business each day – email, text, phone, tweeting, posting, etc – it made perfect send to opt for the US Combo Pass 80. Meanwhile my wife went with the US Combo Pass 25.

Travel HACK – WiFi is your friend! Use apps like What’s App, Skype Calling and Facebook Messenger to connect with people without using up your precious data or airtime.Starbucks are everywhere in the US and not only do they offer a great place to grab a quick coffee, they’ve got free WiFi for all.

Step 3: Be prepared for being unprepared

No matter how much you plan, there will be the unexpected moments that just come out of the blue and leave you wondering what the heck!

This battery pack gets us 2 to 3 full charges of our iPhone 6’s — it’s saved me a few times!

If there’s one thing I can’t stress enough is the benefit of havingbattery power packs! The little battery pack pictured here has saved me many a times while on the road between destinations.

And if there’s one other thing I can leave you with is making sure you have extra cables and adapters. Trust me, if there’s a chance you might lose or misplace one, you will. It happens so be ready for ‘when’ not ‘if’.

To further help, see if your carrier provides simple ways for you to manage your account and keep up to date with where your usage is at. This is very important and I suggest taking a very proactive approach to staying on top of this. I’ve heard from a number of my fellow suitcase entrepreneurs that have gone overboard on their data and received bills that would make you faint.

My carrier, TELUS, offers up a cool Data Travel Tracker option which notifies me by text when I hit my 25%, 50%, 75% and 90% threshold of data usage. Very cool feature and has saved me on more than one occasion from accruing extra charges at ‘roaming’ rates.

I know our journey is only getting started, but thankfully being disconnected is not a concern we have to deal with. Onward and upward, stay tuned for more on our travels in the coming months. If you’d like to learn more about how to connect with us on this journey, visit www.TheLifeEnhancers.com

Safe Travels to you and your tribe!

An impromptu meeting place… (Delmar, California)

Top 10 Tips for Traveling Smart with your SMARTphone

This quick list was extremely helpful in preparing for our jaunt across the border. To help you with planing your next trip out of country, check the full infographic here.